Author Archives: Walter Armstrong

When Big Pharma Leaves Town

By Walter Armstrong | Published: November 16, 2009
Image via Wikipedia Wall Street smiles when a drug company gets with the program by “restructuring” and “rightsizing”—cutting costs through headline-grabbing layoffs. But for Main Street, the story of hundreds or thousands of sales reps, say, and researchers getting kicked to the curb is quite different. The two gi-normous mergers that closed in the past month offer [...]
Posted in Strategy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Tauzin to Boehner: Don’t “Bully” Me

By Walter Armstrong | Published: August 19, 2009
Image via Wikipedia PhRMA chief Billy Tauzin so far shows no sign of waving the white flag in response to an accusatory missive from House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner bludgeoning his former Republican colleague for leading the drug industry’s support of President Obama’s healthcare reform effort. Pointedly CC’d to pharma CEOs – Tauzin’s employers—and simultaneously [...]
Posted in Regulatory | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Playing Spot the Healthcare Lobbyist

By Walter Armstrong | Published: July 8, 2009
National Public Radio has posted an interesting, possibly provocative, but certainly confusing, item on its website. It’s a photograph taken late last month during the first Congressional hearings on the trillion-dollar healthcare reform legislation. Actually, it’s not just a photograph but a panoramic, four-frame, interactive feature complete with cutesy rollover icons. More importantly, it shows not [...]
Posted in Regulatory | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Judge Throws The Book At Former Bristol-Myers Squibb Exec

By Walter Armstrong | Published: June 9, 2009
Media wordsmiths are competing to outdo one another today in punny reporting on the news that ex-BMS exec Andrew Bodnar has been sentenced to write a book about the role he played in the firm’s 2006 reverse-payments case over generic Plavix. “Pen-ance: Bristol-Myers Exec Gets Two Years of Hard Writing,” The Wall Street Journal Law Blog [...]
Posted in Legal | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Latest News from ASCO: Winners, Losers, and Also Rans

By Walter Armstrong | Published: June 3, 2009
Image via Wikipedia Due to pharma’s voluntary moratorium on doling out totefuls of freebies and all the lattes you can swallow, thousands of docs, researchers, and reporters had only their sleep-deprived selves to carry from data dump to data dump at this week’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual confab in Orlando, Florida. Some 4,000 studies [...]
Posted in Events | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment